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Gauss Decomposition, Wakimoto Realisation and Gauged WZNW Models

The implications of gauging the Wess-Zumino-Novikov-Witten (WZNW) model using the Gauss decomposition of the group elements are explored. We show that, contrary to standard gauging of WZNW models, this gauging is carried out by minimally coupling the gauge fields. We find that this gauging, in the case of gauging an abelian vector subgroup, differs from the standard one by terms proportional to the field strength of the gauge fields. We prove that gauging an abelian vector subgroup does not have a nonlinear sigma model interpretation. This is because the target-space metric resulting from the integration over the gauge fields is degenerate. We demonstrate, however, that this kind of gauging has a natural interpretation in terms of Wakimoto variables.